President Donald Trump has shared a shockingly awful AI-generated music video envisioning a future Gaza that has been turned into an ostentatious resort town where everyone parties amid showers of cash while Trump and Netanyahu sip drinks by the pool.
The video is intended to reflect Trump’s plans for a Gaza Strip that has been permanently ethnically cleansed of Palestinians.
If you haven’t watched it yet you definitely should, because words can’t do justice to just how terrible it is.
The most powerful government on earth celebrated the idea of Trump and Netanyahu presiding over orgiastic parties for the obscenely wealthy on a land that has been purged of its indigenous inhabitants following a year and a half of brutal slaughter. Image: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
This video is simultaneously the most American thing that has ever happened and the most Israeli thing that has ever happened. Fake. Gaudy. Sociopathic. Genocidal. Emblematic of all the ugliest values that both dystopian civilizations have come to embody.
They used the most artless art medium in existence to digitally dance on the graves of mountains of dead civilians. The most powerful government on earth celebrated the idea of Trump and Netanyahu presiding over orgiastic parties for the obscenely wealthy on a land that has been purged of its indigenous inhabitants following a year and a half of brutal slaughter.
Twerking to shitty AI-generated techno music surrounded by golden Trump statues and hundred dollar bills, because you are so happy that you finally found a Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem.
President Trump’s AI vision for Gaza – “Fake. Gaudy. Sociopathic. Genocidal.”
It doesn’t get any more American than this, and it doesn’t get any more Israeli. This soulless, artless, conscienceless expression of egotistic masturbation lubricated with the blood of dead children is the Empire at its most honest. This is the very best this globe-dominating power structure has to offer our world.
This entire civilisation is diseased. Not just the United States and Israel but every nation on earth that is subject to the metastases of their cancerous influence. They’re making us all dumber, sicker, nastier, crueler.
Less creative. Less artful. Less caring. Less insightful. They are poisoning our minds and turning our hearts into shit.
This video, in and of itself, is a sufficient argument for the entire US empire to be demolished and sold for scrap metal. https://t.co/18B1t2o2r7
I’ve always said that the only thing I like about Trump is that he puts an honest face on the Empire. In terms of actual policy and actions he’s not much different from any other Republican president, but he has this compulsive inclination to constantly yank off the plastic smileyface mask of the Empire and reveal the snarling blood-spattered face beneath.
This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
That one video, all by itself, tells you more about what the US Empire really is than every movie its PR agents in Hollywood have ever produced. This is the real America. This is the real Israel. This is the real Empire.
The Western media went into overdrive this week to work the laconic Kiwis into a mild frenzy over three Chinese naval vessels conducting exercises in the Tasman Sea a few thousand kilometres off our shores.
What was really behind this orchestrated campaign?
The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean).
“We cannot hide at this end of the world anymore,” Defence Minister Judith Collins said in light of three Chinese boats in the Tasman.
Warrior academics were next . “We need to go to the cutting edge, and we need to do that really, really fast,” the ever-reliable China hawk Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University said, telling 1 News the message of the live-firing exercises was that China wants to rule the waves.
The British Financial Times chimed in with a warning that “A confronting strategic future is arriving fast”.
Could this have anything to do with the fact we are fast approaching the New Zealand government’s 2025 budget and that they — and their Australian, US and UK allies — are intent on a major increase in Kiwi defence funding, moving from around 1.2 percent of GDP to possibly two percent? A long-anticipated Defence Capability Review is also around the corner and is likely to come with quite a shopping list of expensive gear.
The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean). Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
What’s good for the goose . . .
It is worth pointing out that New Zealand and Australian warships sailed through the contested Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the South China Sea as recently as September 2024. What’s good for the goose is good for the Panda.
And, of course, at any one time about 20 US nuclear submarines are prowling in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Each can carry missiles the equivalent of over 1000 Hiroshima bombs — truly apocalyptic.
Veteran New Zealand peace campaigner Mike Smith (a friend) was not in total disagreement with the hawks when it came to the argy-bargy in the Tasman.
“The emergence apparently from nowhere of a Chinese naval expedition in our waters I think may be intended to demonstrate that they have a large and very capable blue water navy now and won’t be penned in by AUKUS submarines when and if they arrive off their coast.
“I think the main message is to the Australians: if you want to homebase nuclear-capable B-52s we have more than one way to come at you. That was also the message of the ICBM they sent into the Pacific: Australia is no longer an unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
According to the Asia Times, China fired the ICBM — the first such shot into the Pacific by China — just days after HMNZS Aotearoa sailed through the Taiwan Strait with Australian vessel HMAS Sydney.
Smith says our focus should be on building positive relationships in the Pacific on our terms. “Buying expensive popguns will not save us.”
China Scare a page out of Australia’s Red Scare playbook
For people good at pattern recognition this week’s China Scare was obviously a page or two out of the same playbook that duped a majority of Australians into believing China was going to invade Australia. They were lulled into a false sense of insecurity back in 2021 — the mediascape flooded with Red Alert, China panic stories about imminent war with the rising Asian power.
As a sign of how successful the mainstream media can be in generating fear that precedes major policy shifts: research by Australia’s Institute of International & Security Affairs showed that more Australians thought that China would soon attack Australia than Taiwanese believed China would attack Taiwan!
Once the population was conditioned, they woke one morning in September 2021 with the momentous news that Australia had ditched a $90 billion submarine defence deal with France and the country was now part of a new anti-Chinese military alliance called AUKUS. This was the playbook that came to mind last week.
There are strong, rational arguments that could be made to increase our spending at this time. But I loathe and decry this kind of manipulation, this manufacturing of consent.
I also fear what those billions of dollars will be used for. Defending our coastlines is one thing; joining an anti-Chinese military alliance to please the US is quite another.
Prime Minister Luxon has called China — our biggest trading partner — a strategic competitor. He has also suggested, somewhat ludicrously, that our military could be a “force multiplier” for Team AUKUS.
We are hitching ourselves to the US at the very time they have proven they treat allies as vassals, threatened to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, continue to commit genocide in Gaza, and are now imposing an unequal treaty on Ukraine.
Australia’s ABC News on Foreign Minister Winston Peter’s talks in China. Video: ABC
Whose side – or calmer independence?
Whose side should we be on? Or should we return to a calmer, more independent posture?
And then there’s the question of priorities. The hawks may convince the New Zealand population that the China threat is serious enough that we should forgo spending money on child poverty, fixing our ageing infrastructure, investing in health and education and instead, as per pressure from our AUKUS partners, spend some serious coin — billions of dollars more — on defence.
Climate change is one battle that is being fought and lost. Will climate funding get the bullet so we can spend on military hardware? That would certainly get a frosty reaction from Pacific nations at the front edge of sea rise.
The government in New Zealand is literally taking the food out of children’s mouths to fund weapons systems. The Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme provides nutritious lunches every day to a quarter of a million of New Zealand’s most needy children.
Its funding has recently been slashed by over $100 million by the government despite its own advisors telling it that such programmes have profound long-term wellbeing benefits and contribute significantly to equity. In the next breath we are told we need to boost funding for our military.
The US appears determined to set itself on a collision course with China but we don’t have to be crash test dummies sitting alongside them. Prudence, preparedness, vigilance and risk-management are all to be devoutly wished for; hitching our fate to a hostile US containment strategy is bad policy both in economic and defence terms.
In the absence of a functioning media — one that showcases diverse perspectives and challenges power rather than works hand-in-glove with it — populations have been enlisted in the most abhorrent and idiotic campaigns: the Red Peril, the Jewish Peril and the Black Peril (in South Africa and the southern states of the USA), to name three.
Our media-political-military complex is at it again with this one — a kind of Yellow Peril Redux.
New Zealand trails behind both Australia and China in development assistance to the Pacific. If we wish to “counter” China, supporting our neighbours would be a better investment than encouraging an unwinnable arms race.
In tandem, I would advocate for a far deeper diplomatic and cultural push to understand and engage with China; that would do more to keep the region peaceful and may arrest the slow move in China towards seeking other markets for the high-quality primary produce that an increasingly bellicose New Zealand still wishes to sell them.
Let’s be friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and he is a regular contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.
Human sacrifice, the suicidal kind, has been around for a long time. You don’t have to approve of it to be deeply moved by the altruism it represents. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
Lest we forget. On 25 February 2024 Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active duty US serviceman, self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
His last words on this Earth, as the fire consumed him, were: “Free Palestine!”
Earlier that day, Aaron posted on X what I am sure will become a historic question re-posed for generations to come:
“What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
“Many of us like to ask ourselves ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
I will never forget the photos of the smiling, obviously sweet young man I looked at, in contrast to the same young man, in the combat dress of a US serviceman, dousing himself in fuel and setting himself ablaze.
In memory of Aaron Bushnell . . . “I will never forget the photos of the smiling, obviously sweet young man I looked at, in contrast to the same young man, in the combat dress of a US serviceman, dousing himself in fuel and setting himself ablaze.” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
How do I contrast that level of commitment with the yawning indifference to genocide I have witnessed so often over the course of the past 16 months? How do I contrast that commitment with politicians calling for more defence force funding without calling for a rupture in our military engagement with Israel or the total diplomatic and economic isolation of the racist, genocidal State of Israel?
When I was a child, 82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz became the first person to self-immolate in the US to protest America’s crimes against the Vietnamese people. She appealed to people to “awake”.
Remember Alice Herz
As she set herself on fire she said she was protesting “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.” We should remember Alice Herz — and her message.
As he calmly walked up to the perimeter fence of the Israeli Embassy one year ago, Aaron Bushnell said:
“I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all.
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.”
Human sacrifice, the suicidal kind, has been around for a long time. You don’t have to approve of it to be deeply moved by the altruism it represents. Given the chance, I would have done everything in my power to deflect Aaron from the course of action he chose.
I commend groups like CodePink in the US who are holding vigils to honour Aaron. CodePink is a women-led grassroots organisation working to end US warfare and imperialism, led by human rights activists including Medea Benjamin.
“Aaron Bushnell made the ultimate sacrifice for peace,” CodePink told me in reply to a request for comment. “His final act against our forced complicity in genocide serves as a poignant reminder of the collective trauma being inflicted on humanity each day we allow this genocide to continue.
‘Bushnell’s blood on officials’ hands’
“Make no mistake, the blood of Aaron Bushnell is on the hands of US elected officials who fund and support the genocide in Gaza. Let us honour Aaron Bushnell’s memory as a catalyst for peace and justice.”
Last weekend I participated in the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) conference in Wellington which was addressed by a variety of speakers. Keynote addresses included the Palestinian author Samah Sabawi (who has just released Cactus Pear For My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza, Penguin).
She told us, “The popular chant in protests ‘We are all Palestinians!’ is more true than most people realise. All of us are changed by the genocide because Israel has lowered our expectations, normalised in our culture behaviour that is criminal.”
The veteran antiracism campaigner John Minto reminded us that we are not here to bear witness to genocide but to stop it.
None of us should feel we have to make the kind of sacrifice that Aaron Bushnell made but all of us need to do that little bit more — if nothing else, than to save our own humanity from vanishing into the sea of indifference that Western culture is drowning in.
On the wall of my office is a photo of my grandfather, Dermot O’Brien. My family is from Cork and members of it were active in the struggle to drive the British out of Ireland.
My grandfather suffered destruction of his home, imprisonment, years on the run, a traumatised family, and other hardships which drove him to an early grave.
But his comrade in the struggle, Terence MacSwiney, paid a greater price. It was not a match or lighter fuel that killed him but his hunger strike.
Terence MacSwiney was the Lord Mayor of Cork, and like Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, like Aaron Bushnell, like Alice Herz and like so many Palestinian people, he just could no longer tolerate the injustice being inflicted by the powerful of this world. He died in a prison in England in 1920.
At the end he said: “It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will conquer.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
A new narrative is being aggressively pushed by Israel and its apologists to justify resuming the Gaza genocide, conveniently just as an important deadline for ceasefire negotiations draws near.
The Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF) is now claiming that the Israeli children Kfir and Ariel Bibas “were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza, no later than November 2023.”
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told the press on Friday that, “Contrary to Hamas’ lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood.
“The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys, they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”
Anyone who has been following the events in Gaza over the last year and a half will be unsurprised to learn that Israel provided no evidence to support these incendiary claims.
Benjamin Netanyahu released a video statement in his signature American English waving around an enlarged photograph of the children and talking about what savage monsters the Palestinians are.
“Hamas murdered them in cold blood,” Netanyahu says, while the camera zooms in on the adorable little redheads. “As the prime minister of Israel, I vow that I will not rest until the savages who executed our hostages are brought to justice. They do not deserve to walk this earth.
“Nothing will stop me. Nothing.”
Sabotaging ceasefire negotiations
This happens just as Netanyahu has been working to sabotage ceasefire negotiations by adding new non-starter demands that were not in the original agreement, just as sources in Israeli media predicted he would do upon his return from Washington earlier this month.
The six-week-long first stage of the ceasefire deal with Hamas is set to expire at the beginning of March next weekend
This is obvious babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda, being released at the most convenient of times. After Israel has been caught lying about beheaded babies and mass rapes and so much more, only an idiot would take any of these claims on faith.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“Today is a tragic day. It’s a day of boundless sorrow, of indescribable pain.
Four-year-old Ariel Bibas, his baby brother one-year-old Kfir and 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz were brutally murdered by Hamas savages. pic.twitter.com/7TMchvOZ9E
But it’s doing the job. Now everywhere you look you’ll see Israel supporters calling to end the ceasefire and reignite the Gaza holocaust to avenge these innocent children. I just saw an article from Tablet Magazine titled “Their Time Is Up,” subtitled “The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us exactly who our Palestinian neighbors are.
“Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action.”
Most likely cause of death
All this despite the fact that we know the most likely cause of the children’s death was the fact that their own government was raining military explosives on places where hostages were being held during that time.
Hamas reported back in November 2023 that the Bibas children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike along with their mother. In December 2023 it was reported in the mainstream press that Hamas had offered to return their bodies to Israel but Israel had refused, telling the press that “Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas”.
You don’t need to trust Hamas or anyone else to deduce that a woman and two children being killed by Israeli airstrikes in an area where many women and children were being killed by Israeli airstrikes every day is a much more likely scenario than Palestinian resistance fighters spontaneously deciding to murder children with their bare hands instead of using them as negotiating leverage as planned.
As journalist Muhammad Shehada recently noted on Twitter, Israel already has an established track record of lying about Hamas killing hostages who were actually killed in Israeli airstrikes.
In December 2023, Israel informed the families of three hostages that they had been murdered by Hamas. The mother of one of the hostages kept digging and eventually discovered that they had died of asphyxiation when IDF troops “gassed” the tunnel they were hiding in.
Last September, the IDF admitted that they had killed the hostages in an airstrike and lied about it.
Three weeks ago Shehada correctly predicted in an article with Zeteo that Israel was preparing to use the Bibas deaths as an excuse to terminate the ceasefire, long before any of this started.
Shehada noticed the way pro-Israel narrative managers had been pushing the line that great vengeance must be exacted upon Gaza if it turns out the Bibas children have been harmed, despite Hamas having announced their deaths more than a year ago.
They knew those children were dead, so after the ceasefire was announced in late January they began circulating the narrative that discovery of their demise would be a valid reason to end it.
🚨BREAKING | Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children, ages 12 and 13, in the illegally occupied West Bank today. Both were reportedly shot in the back. https://t.co/6iqVf7Nasg
Israel forces shoot dead 2 Palestinian children
Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children in the West Bank just yesterday — both of them shot in the back. You could be forgiven for not knowing that this happened, because the Western political/media class has been too focused on the deaths of two little white kids to pay attention to such trivialities.
Israel needs to keep “discovering” new Hamas atrocities from 2023 because otherwise it just looks like one-sided atrocities being committed by Israel this whole time. First it was beheaded babies, then later it was “We’ve discovered Hamas did mass rapes!”, and now it’s the Bibas kids.
They need to do this because the Hamas attack was the last time anything happened where Israel could frame itself as the victim, so they’ve been milking it and milking it and milking it for as long as possible while committing orders of magnitude worse abuse in Gaza.
It’s all designed to drum up outrage, and to draw sympathy toward Israel and away from the obvious victims who Israel has been abusing, displacing and mass murdering for a year and a half.
As calls to rain vengeance upon Gaza grow louder, remember this: the Bibas kids aren’t the reason, they’re the excuse. The excuse to advance pre-planned agendas against the Palestinians that have been in place since long before those children were born.
“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture, and it is not for sale. Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.” Image: Instagram/#flyer_for_falastin/@tahiapretiti
OPEN LETTER: By Hassan Abo Qamar
Dear Mr Trump,
I am writing to you as a Palestinian and a survivor of genocide, who was born and raised in Gaza — a city of love and resilience.
I have read your statements about Gaza and frankly, I am confused.
You claim to be a “peacemaker”, but encourage Israel to continue its genocide, calling for “all hell” to break loose if your demands are not fulfilled.
Mr Trump, we have already been through hell. We lost 60,000 martyrs in it.
You claim credit for the ceasefire deal, and yet your government — one of its guarantors — refuses to pressure Israel into fulfilling all its obligations under it.
You call Gaza a “demolition site” but conveniently fail to name the criminal responsible — while simultaneously supplying it with more bombs, funding, and diplomatic cover.
You talk about Palestinians being “safe” and “happy”, yet you refer to us as if we are a burden to be offloaded onto Jordan, Egypt, or any country willing to take us.
You claim that we “only want to be in the Gaza Strip because [we] don’t know anything else”.
“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture, and it is not for sale. Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.” Image: Instagram/#flyer_for_falastin/@tahiapretitiYou profoundly misunderstand us
Mr Trump, I think you profoundly misunderstand who we are and what Gaza is to us.
You may think of us as a mere obstacle to your vision of luxury resorts, but we are a people with deep roots, long history, and unalienable rights.
We are the rightful owners of our land.
Gaza is not your business venture, and it is not for sale.Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.
And no, it is not true that we want to stay here because we “know nothing else”.
Although the 17-year-long Israeli siege has made life incredibly difficult for us, some of us have still managed to travel — for education, medical treatment or work. But these people still return because Gaza is home.
He earned his master’s degree in the UK and later completed his PhD at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Despite having the opportunity to stay abroad, he chose to return to Gaza, where he taught creative writing and literature at the Islamic University.
He also co-founded We Are Not Numbers, an initiative that paired young Palestinian writers with experienced authors to amplify their voices and resist occupation through storytelling. One of these voices is mine.
Last spring, I, too, had the opportunity to leave, but I decided against it. I could not leave my family, friends and Gaza amid a genocidal war. However, like many others, I plan to travel to complete my education and then return to help rebuild and support my people.
The Palestinian way
This is the Palestinian way – we seek knowledge and opportunities, not to abandon our homeland, but to build and strengthen it.
Speaking of building — you talk about your plans to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. The thing is, Gaza was the Riviera of the Middle East. Our ancestors built it into a flourishing trade hub, port city and cultural centre. It was “magnificent” — to use your words — until Israel was created and it started destroying it.
And yet, after every brutal Israeli assault on Gaza, Palestinians would rebuild. Despite all the Israeli violence, restrictions and thievery, Palestinians still made sure Gaza was a safe place with a cosy rhythm of life, where its youth were doing their best to pursue decent livelihoods, where families were happy and together, and where homes thrived.
Israel has now tried to reduce all of Gaza to rubble and death so we are no longer able to live in it. You have picked up on the idea, effectively endorsing our ethnic cleansing under the veneer of humanitarianism.
No, Mr Trump, we will not be “happy” and “safe” elsewhere.
But I agree with you on something else you said: “You’ve got to learn from history”. Indeed, history teaches us that settler-colonialism in modern times is unsustainable. In this sense, your plans and Israel’s plans are doomed to fail.
We, the people of Gaza – like any Indigenous people – refuse to be uprooted. We refuse to be dispossessed. We refuse to be forced into exile so that our land can be handed to the highest bidder. We are not a problem to be solved; we are a people with the right to live in our homeland in freedom and dignity.
No amount of bombs, blockades, or tanks will make us forget that. We will not be relocated, resettled, or replaced.
Power and wealth will not decide the fate of Gaza. History is not written by thieves – it is written by those who resist, by the will of the people. No matter the pressure, our connection to this land will never be severed. Surrender and abandonment are not an option. We will honour our martyrs with resistance by nourishing this land with love, care and remembrance.
Wishing you all the best in your futile pursuits,
Hassan Abuqamar Gaza, Palestine
This open letter was first published by Al Jazeera.
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the Cook Islands move. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.
It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the Cook Islands move. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.
“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.
“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR
‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.
“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.
“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”
This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.
The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.
Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.
The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.
Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:
“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”
All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:
“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”
A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.
New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.
Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.
“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”
Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.
Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.
Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.
It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.
Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:
“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.
I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.
We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.
In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.
Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.
Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
The United States shares the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.
ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalising the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths.
Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society. Cartoon: Mr Fish/The Chris Hedges Report
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing
from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organisation.
They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza.
They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal.
They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under US control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the US.
Uttering nonsensical remarks
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.
These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianised” state led by a divinely anointed leader.
They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt.
They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.
Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.
“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book.
“Labour unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytising mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”
Chris Hedges talks to Marc Lamont Hill on Up Front on why “democracy doesn’t exist in the United States” today. Video: Al Jazeera
Comforting to most Americans
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.”
They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings.Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine.
Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration.
Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.
The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.
The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.
Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponised to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the UN and other multilateral organisations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the US military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organisations and initiatives, including training programmes so Bolivian youth could be taught the American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.
Kennard in his book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, documents how US institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.
Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programmes, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.
The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programmes facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.
Our US tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialisation lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically”.
Legitimises theft at home
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.
“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the US, is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labour and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview.
“You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”
These same US institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the US empire, for prime minister in Britain.
The US disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.
Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by US corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the US military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child labourers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.
The demise of American power
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organisations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals
and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalise the leviathan they worship.
They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education
and the US Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the US will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates.
The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.
Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just 27 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the US invaded Iraq],” he writes.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, including due process, torture, militarised police, the massive prison system, militarised drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
President Trump speaks of transforming Gaza into a magnificent "Riviera of the Middle East". Obviously, the starved amputees of Gaza do not fit his image of the classy people he wants to see in the Riviera he wants to build, on stolen Palestinian land. Image: johnmenadue.com
COMMENTARY: By Sawsan Madina
I watched US President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week in utter disbelief. Not that the idea, or indeed the practice, of ethnic cleansing of Palestine is new.
But at that press conference the mask has fallen. Recently, fascism has been on the march everywhere, but that press conference seemed to herald an age of naked fascism.
So the Palestinians have just been “unlucky” for decades.
“Their lives have been made hell.” Thank God for grammar’s indirect speech. Their lives have been made hell. We do not know who made their lives hell. Nothing to see here.
Trump says of Gaza: “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area . . . ”
I wonder who are those lucky “people of the area” he has in mind, once those “unlucky” Palestinians have been “transferred” out of their homeland.
Trump speaks of transforming Gaza into a magnificent “Riviera of the Middle East”. Obviously, the starved amputees of Gaza do not fit his image of the classy people he wants to see in the Riviera he wants to build, on stolen Palestinian land.
No ethnic cleansing questions
After the press conference, I did not hear a single question about ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation or international law.
Under the new fascist leaders, just like under the old ones, those words have become old-fashioned and are to be expunged from the lexicon.
The difference has never been more striking between the meek who officially hold the title “journalist” and the brave who actually work to hold the powerful to account.
Now, more than ever, independent journalists are a threatened species. We should treasure them, support them and protest every attempt to silence them.
Gaza is now the prototype. We can forget international laws and international organisations. We have the bombs. You do as we wish or you will be obliterated.
Who now dares say that the forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime under the Geneva Convention? But then again, Trump and Netanyahu are not really talking about “forced transfer”. They are talking about “voluntary transfer”.
Once the remaining Israeli hostages have been freed, and water and food have been cut off again, those unlucky Palestinians will climb voluntarily onto the buses waiting to transport them to happiness and prosperity in Egypt and Jordan.
Or to whatever other client state Trump manages to threaten or bribe.
Can the International Criminal Court (ICC) command a shred of respect when Netanyahu is sharing the podium with Trump? Or indeed when Trump is at the podium?
Dismantling the international order
Recently, fascist leaders have been dismantling the international order by accusing its organisations and officials of being “antisemitic” or “working with terrorists”. Tomorrow they will defund and delegitimise these organisations without the need for an excuse.
I listen to Trump speak of combatting antisemitism and deporting Hamas sympathisers and I hear, “We will combat anti-Israel views and we will deport those who protest Israel’s crimes.
“And we will continue to conflate antisemitism and anti-Israel’s views in order to silence pro-Palestinian voices.”
I watch Trump and Netanyahu, the former reading the thoughts of a real estate developer turned into a president’s speech and the latter grinning like a Cheshire cat — and I am gripped by fear. Not just for the Palestinians, but for all humanity.
If we think fascism is only coming for people on a distant shore, we ought to think again.
I watch Netanyahu repeating lies that investigative journalists have spent months debunking. Why would he care? The truth about his lies will not make it to mainstream media and the consciousness of the majority of people.
Hamas suspends the release of Gaza captives, accusing Israel of violating the ceasefire by continuing to kill Palestinians and blocking humanitarian aid.
Lies taking hold, enduring
And the more he repeats those lies, the more they take hold and endure.
I wonder how our political leaders will spin our allies’ new, illegal and immoral plans. For years, they have clung to the mantra of the two-state solution while Israel continued to make every effort to render this solution unfeasible.
What will they say now? With what weasel words will they stay on the same page as our friends in the US and Israel?
Netanyhu praises Trump for thinking outside the box. Here is an idea that Israel has spent billions on arms and propaganda to persuade people that it is dangerously outside the box.
Instead of asking Egypt and Jordan to take the Palestinians, why not make Israel end the occupation and give Palestinians equal rights in their own homeland?
Sawsan Madina is former head of Australia’s SBS Television. This article was first published by John Menadue’s public policy journal Pearls and Irritations and is republished with permission.
Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu "erased" Palestine from the Middle East map figuratively. Hamas leaders also understood the message all too well. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
It generally ends badly. An old tyrant embarks on an ill-considered project that involves redrawing maps.
They are heedless to wise counsel and indifferent to indigenous interests or experience. Before they fail, are killed, deposed or otherwise disposed of, these vicious old men can cause immense harm.
To see Trump through this lens, let’s look at a group of men who tested their cartographic skills and failed: King Lear and, of course, Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte, and latterly, George W Bush and Saddam Hussein.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu “erased” Palestine from the Middle East map figuratively. Hamas leaders also understood the message all too well. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
I even throw in a Pope. But let’s start first with Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself.
Benjamin Netanyahu and a map of a ‘New Middle East’ — without Palestine
In September 2023, a month before the Hamas attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to an almost-empty UN General Assembly. Few wanted to share the same air as the man.
In his speech, he presented a map of a “New Middle East” — one that contained a Greater Israel but no Palestine.
In a piece in The Jordan Times titled: “Cartography of genocide”, Ramzy Baroud explained why Netanyahu erased Palestine from the map figuratively. Hamas leaders also understood the message all too well.
“Generally, there was a consensus in the political bureau: We have to move, we have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten — totally deleted from the international map,” Dr Bassem Naim, a leading Hamas official said in the outstanding Al Jazeera documentary October 7.
Hearing Trump and Netanyahu last week, the Hamas assessment was clear-eyed and prescient.
Donald Trump In defiance of UN resolutions and international law, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, recognised the Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel, and now wants to turn Gaza into a US real estate development, reconquer Panama, turn Canada into the 51st State of the USA, rename the Gulf of Mexico and seize Greenland, if necessary by force.
And it’s only February. The US spent blood, treasure and decades building the Rules-Based International Order. Biden and Trump have left it in tatters.
Trump is a fitting avatar for the American state: morally corrupt, narcissistic, burning down all the temples to international law, and generally causing chaos as he flames his way into ignominy.
The past week — where “Bonkers is the New Normal” — reminded me of a famous Onion headline: “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States”.
The Iranians made a brilliant counter-offer to the US plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and create a US statelet next to Israel — send the Israelis to Greenland! Unlike the genocidal US and Israeli leadership, the Iranians were kidding.
Point taken, though.
King Lear: ‘Meantime we will express our darker purpose. Give me the map there.’
Lear makes the list because of Shakespeare’s understanding of tyrants and those who oppose them.
Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Kent: My life I never held but as a pawn to wage against thy enemies.
Lear: Out of my sight!
Kent and all those who sought to steer the King towards a more prudent course were treated as enemies and traitors. I think of Ambassador Chas Freeman, John Mearsheimer, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, George Beebe and all the other wiser heads who have been pushed to the periphery in much the same way.
Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths.
Napoleon Bonaparte I was fortunate to study “France on the Eve of Revolution” with the great French historian Antoine Casanova. His fellow Corsican caused a fair bit of mayhem with his intention to redraw the map of Europe.
British statesman William Pitt the Younger reeled in horror as Napoleon got to work, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these 10 years,” he presciently said.
Bonaparte was an important historical figure who left a mixed and contested legacy.
Before effective resistance could be organised, he abolished the Holy Roman Empire (good job), created the Confederation of the Rhine, invaded Russia and, albeit sometimes for the better, torched many of the traditional power structures.
Millions died in his wars.
We appear to be back to all that: a leader who tears up all rule books. Trump endorses the US-Israeli right of conquest, sanctions the International Criminal Court (ICC) for trying to hold Israel and the US to the same standard as others, and hands out the highest offices to his family and confidantes.
Hitler “Lebensraum” (Living space) was the Nazi concept that propelled the German war machine to seize new territories, redraw maps. As they marched, the soldiers often sang “Deutschland über alles”(Germany above all), their ultra-nationalist anthem that expressed a desire to create a Greater Germany — to Make Germany Great Again.
All sounds a bit similar to this discussion of Trump and Netanyahu, doesn’t it? Again: whose side should we be on?
Saddam Hussein and George W Bush When it comes to doomed bids to remake the Middle East by launching illegal wars, these are two buttocks of the same bum. Now we have the Trump-Netanyahu pair.
Will countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK really sign up for the current US-Israeli land grab? Will they all continue to yawn and look away as massive crimes against humanity are committed? I fear so, and in so doing, they rob their side of all legitimacy.
Pope Alexander VI There is a smack of the Borgias about the Trumps. They share values — libertinism and nepotism, to name two — and both, through cunning rather than aptitude, managed to achieve great power.
Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, father to Lucretia and Cesare, was Pope in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
1494. The Treaty of Tordesillas hands the New World over to the Spanish and Portuguese. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
He was responsible for the greatest reworking of the map of the world: the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the “New World” between the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Millions died; trillions were stolen.
We still live with the depravities the Europeans and their heritors unleashed upon the world.
I’m sure the Greenlanders, the Canadians, the Panamanians and whoever else the United States sets their sights on will resist the unwelcome attempt to colour the map of their country in stars & stripes.
History is littered with blind map re-makers, foolish old men who draw new maps on old lands.
Like Sykes, Picot, Balfour and others, Trump thinks with a flourish of his pen he can whisk away identity and deep roots. Love of country and long-suffering mean Palestinians will never accept a handful of coins and parcels of land spread across West Asia or Africa as compensation for a stolen homeland.
They have earned the right to Palestine not least because of the blood-spattered identity that they have carved out of every inch of land through their immense courage and steadfastness. We should stand with them.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
British journalist Richard Medhurst is once again being persecuted by federal law enforcement in yet another Western nation for his reporting on the abuses of Israel and its Western backers, this time in Austria.
Austrian police and intelligence services reportedly detained Medhurst in Vienna last Monday, then searched his home and seized electronic devices, saying they did so on the suspicion that he is “affiliated with Hamas”.
In August, Medhurst was arrested by British counterterrorism police under Section 12 of the UK Terrorism Act of 2000 and detained for 24 hours, reportedly for expressing political opinions that were deemed too sympathetic toward a proscribed terrorist group.
In other words, a Western journalist has been targeted and persecuted by law enforcement in multiple Western nations for speech that is critical of Israel.
This comes days after journalist Ali Abunimah was jailed for two nights by Swiss police for expressing wrongthink about Israel, and continues a trend that’s been escalating since the Gaza holocaust began.
Really sit and contemplate how creepy and frightening it is that civil rights are being systematically dismantled throughout the Western world in the name of protecting the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state in the Middle East.
On orders of President Trump, a multi-agency task force has been launched in the US with the official purpose of combating antisemitism in schools and universities, and the unofficial purpose of targeting pro-Palestine activists.
It’s getting bad here in Australia as well. The other day a sports journalist was fired for retweeting factual information about Israel’s abuses and told that his termination was because his retweets had caused Jews in Melbourne to “feel unsafe” hearing his voice in their ears from the radio.
The head of Australia’s state broadcaster ABC just said it’s antisemitic to use the phrase “unlawful occupation of Palestine” as he argued to justify the corporation’s termination of journalist Antoinette Lattouf, who was also fired for retweeting facts about Israel’s criminality in Gaza.
I recently noticed that I myself am being followed/monitored on Twitter by the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, which has played a leading role in stomping out criticism of Israel and targeting journalists in my country. It’s an uncomfortable sensation realising these freaks are watching you.
Persecution of journalism. Video: Richard Medhurst
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Former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has admitted to the already long-established fact that the IDF caused much of the death and destruction seen on October 7 when its forces began firing on Israelis to prevent them from being taken hostage in enactment of Israel’s notorious Hannibal Directive.
That’s right kids, never forget October 7, that terrible day when a thousand Israelis were massacred by Israeli bullets and Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters, and also by Hamas a bit.
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Everything we’ve been seeing in Gaza and the West Bank has been the result of an agenda to remove all Palestinians from Palestine via death or displacement. Everything.
It was never about fighting terrorism. It’s not about rescuing the Palestinians from a ruined enclave. It’s never been about self-defence. It’s never been about hostages. It has always been about ending the existence of Palestinians in Palestine so that their territories can be fully owned by Jewish Israelis.
This has been true of all of Israel’s abusive actions since October 2023, and it was true of all of Israel’s abusive actions before October 2023.
This is what the Palestinians are resisting, and it’s why October 7 happened in the first place. We’re watching an indigenous population struggle against an agenda — an agenda which is backed by an entire globe-spanning empire — to end their existence as a people in their native homeland.
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What Caitlin Johnstone wrote about the Israeli land grab in Gaza on 20 October 2023.
It’s so obnoxious how Democrats are framing this ethnic cleansing plan as a push that emerged out of nowhere when Trump took office. Ethnic cleansing was ALWAYS the plan for the day after Gaza was demolished.
This all happened while Biden was president. Biden committed the murder, Trump’s just the guy who showed up to help dispose of the body. It’s just different parts of the same crime.
You don’t commit a murder without a plan to dispose of the body, and you can’t dispose of a body without having first committed the murder. Democratic Party loyalists are pointing and shrieking at the mobster who’s sinking the body in the river saying “Look! He killed that guy, all by himself!” as though we didn’t all just watch the other mobster shoot the victim in the head.
![“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture](https://davidrobie.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Palestine-is-not-for-sale-@Flyer-680wide-.png "Palestine is not for sale @Flyer 680wide")
